Thursday, October 10, 2013

The Origins of the Displaced Detective by Author Stephanie Osborn

I suppose the first thing you should know about me is that,
well, I really AM one of those rocket scientists you hear about. With degrees
in four sciences and subspecialties in a couple more, I worked in the civilian
and military space industries, sitting console in the control centers, training
astronauts, you name it; and I lost a friend aboard Columbia, when she broke up over Texas. So yeah, I’m the real deal.

The second thing you need to know about me is that I’ve been
a Sherlock Holmes fan… aficionado, whatever word you prefer… since I was a kid.
Someone gave me a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles for my birthday one
year. I was in, what, third grade? With a hyperactive imagination. Scared me to
death when I read it. But I loved Holmes immediately. If I could have done away
with the scary story about the Hound, I’d have adored that book even then. It’s
one of my favorites now.

By the time I was in high school, I’d discovered that big,
single-volume compendium ― you know, the one with the rust-and-mustard dust
jacket? If you’re a Holmes aficionado, you know the one I mean. If you don’t,
go find it! I read it cover to cover. Wagged it around to every class with me,
and every time I had 2 consecutive spare minutes, my nose was in it. Oh, I was
devastated when I read The Final Problem.
No, really: I went into mourning, like I’d lost family! And I could have turned
handsprings for joy when I read The Empty
House! Many years later, I acquired that same rust-and-mustard volume and
placed it on my own shelves, where it has been read cover to cover many more
times. I picked up what are known as “pastiches,” too, efforts by other authors
to carry on the adventures, or create entirely new ones, or fill in gaps. (What
did Holmes and Watson do when the Martians invaded? What about Jack the Ripper,
and why did Watson never chronicle an adventure about him? Didn’t Holmes go
after him? What really happened with the Giant Rat of Sumatra?) I watched
television and movies ― to this day, I watch the BBC’s Sherlock, and CBS’ Elementary,
and even the Guy Ritchie film franchise starring Robert Downey, Jr. And I have
the complete set of the Grenada series starring Jeremy Brett, and a bunch of
the Basil Rathbone films. Good, bad, or indifferent, they’re all Holmes!

Now, back in Arthur Conan Doyle’s day, they didn’t have all
the breakdown of literature into genres that we have today. Today we have
science fiction (or SF, with its many subdivisions), fantasy, horror, and such.
But all those, in the Victorian era, were lumped together and considered speculative fiction, or “specfic” as
it’s known today. As it turns out, many if not most of the Holmes adventures
would be considered as specfic ― and I started thinking…

…Other people have
“done” Holmes in Victorian-era science fiction...

…But I want to be
different. If I write Holmes, I want to do something that’s never been done
before…

…Aha. What if,
somehow, I could manage to drag Holmes into the modern world to go adventuring?

How to do it…how to do
it…

I researched and I studied. And then it hit me.

What if I use the
concept of alternate realities, which more and more scientific data indicates
are real, and I combine that with something called M theory in order to be able
to access them…

…And I was off!

I already had several novels written but unsold by that
point, and there was publisher interest in my first one, Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281. (Yes, I like to mix
science fiction and mystery. It seems to come naturally to me; I’ve always
thought a good SF story has a distinct element of the mysterious. That’s why I
got dubbed The Interstellar Woman of
Mystery by certain media personalities.) So I knew about writing novels:
See, it isn’t about page count, it’s about word count.

Different genres define book length by different word
counts. YA is relatively short, say 50,000-80,000 words. The romance genre
generally defines a novel at roughly the same word count. But SF and mystery,
for instance, consider a novel to run from about 80,000-110,000 words, maybe a
smidge more. (Think about the thinness of a typical Harlequin Romance as
compared to, say, a Baen military SF novel.) There’s an arcane formula that
ties word count to final page count, and another that determines the list price
from the page count. So these are important numbers, these word counts.

Now that’s not to say that you can’t go over; you can… provided
your last name is something like King, Weber, or Rowling. Because publishers
know those names will sell books regardless of length. Everybody else? Don’t be
too short OR too long.

So I sat down to write The
Case of the Displaced Detective, the first story in what has become my
Displaced Detective series, described rather aptly as, “Sherlock Holmes meets
the X-Files.”

Two months ― yes, you read that right, months, not years ―
later, I’d completed the rough draft… and it stood at 215,000 words. Writing
that manuscript was kinda like tryin’ to hold a wide-open fire hose all by
yourself. I ate at the computer. I all but slept at the computer. That story
just came pouring out. I couldn’t stop until it was all written. By the time
I’d polished it, it had ballooned up to around 245,000 words, and I managed to
whack it down to about 230,000.

But it was too big for a single book. And nobody could
figure out how to cut it down without cutting out essential parts ― not me, not
agent, not editor, not publisher. See, it was really two stories in one: it was
an “origin story” of sorts, how Holmes came to be in the 21st
century, AND it had a mystery. It needed all of those 230,000 words to tell the
story properly.

In the end, my publisher and I decided to make two volumes
of it. That’s why, when you look at the covers, you don’t just see The Arrival, or At Speed. You see The Case of
the Displaced Detective: The Arrival, and The Case of the Displaced Detective: At Speed. There’s not a hard
and fast break between the origin story and the mystery; in fact the mystery
starts within days of Holmes landing in the 21st century in The Arrival, and he is still trying to
come to terms with everything in At Speed.

Then I went on to write the next story, The Case of the Cosmological Killer.

And durned if the same thing didn’t happen! Only this one
took a smidge longer, because it was interrupted by an illness. All told I
think it took about a year or so. And so books 3 & 4 are The Case of the Cosmological Killer: The
Rendlesham Incident, and The Case of
the Cosmological Killer: Endings and Beginnings.

I swear they’re not all going to be two volumes! In fact I
just turned in A Case of Spontaneous
Combustion, and it’s one volume only! I’ve started on book 6, A Little Matter of Earthquakes, and book
7, The Adventure of Shining Mountain
Lodge, is mostly finished and awaiting the publication of 5 & 6.

And I’m
planning for adventures beyond that.

So in a manner of speaking, I suppose I’m still adventuring
with my old pal Sherlock Holmes… only now he’s investigating mysteries that are
more on MY turf! And I plan to do so until we both retire to the Sussex downs
to keep bees!

ABOUT THE CASE OF THE DISPLACED DETECTIVE: THE ARRIVAL

The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival is a SF mystery in which brilliant hyperspatial physicist, Dr. Skye Chadwick, discovers there are alternate realities, often populated by those we consider only literary characters. Her pet research, Project: Tesseract, hidden deep under Schriever AFB, finds Continuum 114, where Sherlock Holmes was to have died along with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. In a Knee-jerk reaction, Skye rescues Holmes, who inadvertently flies through the wormhole to our universe, while his enemy plunges to his death. Unable to go back without causing devastating continuum collapse, Holmes must stay in our world and adapt. Meanwhile, the Schriever AFB Dept of Security discovers a spy ring working to dig out the details of - and possibly sabotage - Project: Tesseract. Can Chadwick help Holmes come up to speed in modern investigative techniques in time to stop the spies? Will Holmes be able to thrive in our modern world? Is Chadwick now Holmes' new "Watson" - or more? And what happens next?

ABOUT THE CASE OF THE DISPLACED DETECTIVE: AT SPEED

Having foiled sabotage of Project: Tesseract by an unknown spy ring, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Skye Chadwick face the next challenge. How do they find the members of this diabolical spy ring when they do not even know what the ring is trying to accomplish? And how can they do it when Skye is recovering from no less than two nigh-fatal wounds? Further complicating matters is their relationship. For the ups and downs between Holmes and Chadwick are due to something more than the occasional clash of demanding, eccentric personalities. Chadwick acknowledges to herself that she has fallen in love with Holmes. Knowing he eschews matters of the heart, however, she struggles to hide it, in order to maintain the friendship they do have, preferring said friendship to total alienation. Holmes also feels attraction - but fights it tooth and nail, refusing to admit to the fact, even to himself. After all, it is not merely Skye's work the spies may be after - but her life as well. Having already lost Watson to the vagaries of spacetime, could he endure losing another companion? Can they work out the intricacies of their relationship? Can they determine the reason the spy ring is after the tesseract? And - most importantly - can they stop it?

ABOUT THE CASE OF THE COSMOLOGICAL KILLER: THE RENDLESHAM INCIDENT

In 1980, RAF Bentwaters and Woodbridge were plagued by UFO sightings that were never solved. Now a resident of Suffolk has died of fright during a new UFO encounter. On holiday in London, Sherlock Holmes and Skye Chadwick-Holmes are called upon by Her Majesty's Secret Service to investigate the death. What is the UFO? Why does Skye find it familiar? Who - or what - killed McFarlane? And how can the pair do what even Her Majesty's Secret Service could not? The Case of the Cosmological Killer: The Rendlesham Incident is the third book in an exciting and popular science fiction and mystery series.

ABOUT THE CASE OF THE COSMOLOGICAL KILLER: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

After the revelations in The Rendlesham Incident, Holmes and Skye find they have not one, but two, very serious problems facing them. Not only did their "UFO victim" most emphatically NOT die from a close encounter, he was dying twice over – from completely unrelated causes. Holmes must now find the murderers before they find the secret of the McFarlane farm. And to add to their problems, another continuum – containing another Skye and Holmes – has approached Skye for help to stop the collapse of their own spacetime, a collapse that could take Skye with it, should she happen to be in their tesseract core when it occurs.
The Case of the Cosmological Killer: Endings and Beginnings is the fourth book in an exciting and popular science fiction and mystery series.

The Case of the Displaced Detective: The Arrival

The Case of the Displaced Detective: At Speed

The Case of the Cosmological Killer: The Rendlesham Incident

The Case of the Cosmological Killer: Endings and Beginnings

ABOUT STEPHANIE OSBORN

Few can claim the varied background of Stephanie Osborn, the Interstellar Woman of Mystery.
Veteran of more than 20 years in the civilian space program, as well as various military space defense programs, she worked on numerous space shuttle flights and the International Space Station, and counts the training of astronauts on her resumé. Her space experience also includes Spacelab and ISS operations, variable star astrophysics, Martian aeolian geophysics, radiation physics, and nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons effects.
Stephanie holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in four sciences: astronomy, physics, chemistry and mathematics, and she is “fluent” in several more, including geology and anatomy.
In addition she possesses a license of ministry, has been a duly sworn, certified police officer, and is a National Weather Service certified storm spotter.
Her travels have taken her to the top of Pikes Peak, across the world’s highest suspension bridge, down gold mines, in the footsteps of dinosaurs, through groves of giant Sequoias, and even to the volcanoes of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest, where she was present for several phreatic eruptions of Mount St. Helens.
Now retired from space work, Stephanie has trained her sights on writing. She has authored, co-authored, or contributed to more than 20 books, including the celebrated science-fiction mystery, Burnout: The mystery of Space Shuttle STS-281. She is the co-author of the “Cresperian Saga,” book series, and currently writes the critically acclaimed “Displaced Detective” series, described as “Sherlock Holmes meets The X-Files.” She recently released the paranormal/horror novella El Vengador, based on a true story, as an ebook.
In addition to her writing work, the Interstellar Woman of Mystery now happily “pays it forward,” teaching math and science through numerous media including radio, podcasting and public speaking, as well as working with SIGMA, the science-fiction think tank.
The Mystery continues.
You can visit Stephanie Osborn’s website at http://www.stephanie-osborn.com.

WATCH THE TRAILER!

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